Very personal folk opera art songs. A Taiwanese-East Timorian out of Peoria, Illinois. Shyu (SHOO) sings a mix of her own writings with traditional songs and poetry accompanying herself on Asian string instruments and backed by a jazz quartet. Microtonal flourishes blur into Western vibrato. Libretto is in English.
Track 9 text based on East Timor’s Report On Reconciliation, a sad saga of rape and torture.
Track 2 a very compelling story about a girl eating and being eaten by a beautiful white flower.
White Out is Lin Culbertson on electronics and Tom Surgal on drums and they have gigged with Nels Cline for fifteen years. Recorded in Tom and Lin’s apartment, this is their first album together. Sometimes droning, sometimes percussive, ‘wet’ sounding. Snare drum has the strainer relaxed. Knobs are twiddled. Song titles refer to sky, clouds, mist, and light: images and ideas in constant flux. Active but not aggressive. Songs peter out.
Pi recordings, Jazz CD
Tuba solo is on track three.
Jagged spectral funk from Brooklyn guitarist associated with Henry Threadgill/Zooid, and M-Base. Prolific studio engineer, a nice recording. Bay Area-raised, played early gigs with The Coup. Part groovin’, part advanced compositions. Rhythm section bass, drums and tuba.
Tracks 1,3,5 hit harder. Tracks 2,4 more exploratory. They’d be good two in a row. Track 9 has breakcore drum programming.
Previous- Ophiuchus Butterfly (Jazz CD)
Sideman/engineer- Henry Threadgill/Zooid, Steve Coleman, Vijay Iyer
Also on Pi Recordings- A lot. Steve Lehman, plays sax here and leads his own group.
This was my first time hosting the Jazz Collective, a long-running show hosted by an ever-evolving platoon of KFJC DJs. From a programming perspective, you are expected to choose from the Jazz library or new Jazz releases. You don’t have to play 35% current releases, which is usually the case when you are programming at KFJC. This made it easier to program. It was my first daytime shift. It was during fundraiser. There were more breaks than I’d taken before and more work in the booth, faster record juggling, and more on-mic presentations. It was kind of stressful.
Hour 1: Starts at 1:55 so you get a few minutes of Sally Goodin. I started out with a Charlie Parker album, and moved through Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Gerry Mulligan, featuring saxes throughout the hour.
Hour 2: Clifford Brown, Ben Webster, and then more modern with Steve Lehman, Yoni Kretzmer, and Lisa Mezzacappa.
Hour 3: Lisa Mezzacappa skipped as soon as I went to the bathroom! Then I explored a more Eastern take on jazz.
This show marks a milestone. I’ve completed 13 graveyard shifts, and I can move on to daytime shifts. I’ve had a good time working the graveyard shifts and I will miss it. My family won’t. I’d go to bed around 7 PM the night before, wake up by alarm at 12:20 AM, and head in to the studio. Nami left me a banana, some granola, and a pot of coffee in a thermos. It worked pretty well. I didn’t get tired and I was often able to get calm enough to really contemplate the sound. I played some spaced-out music. I told my friend that I felt like a man holding a torch next to a vast ocean, surrounded by the dark night. I let the sound ring out into the darkness. Embers fell from my torch. When I got home, I napped for an hour or two right after breakfast.
For my last shift, I tried to find out something about contemporary composers. I played music of stringed instruments. I took a trip around the world.
Hour 1: Starts at 1:55 so you get a few minutes of Goodwrench. After a short stop at Norcal Noisefest 2000, the hour is bookended by Ligeti, older and younger. In between, traditional sounds from Korea, North America, Japan, Morocco, and Mexico.
Hour 2: Twentieth- and twenty-first-century sounds, the results of an inquiry into contemporary western classical music.
Hour 3: Sun Ra and Voicehandler set the tone for the second hour of inquiry about a contemporary.
Hour 4: I just had to figure it out, “What does classical music sound like now?” No conclusion.
Started out on a jazz trip, into a mix of international sounds from Japan, Mali, and South America. Western classical music rears its pretty head, Agnes Martin On Not Thinking, wrapping up strangely.
Hour 1: Starts at 1:55 so you get a few minutes of Goodwrench. Then it’s a Jazz trip for the first hour.
Hour 2: Jazz rolls on for twenty odd minutes, then Acid Mothers Temple guitarist Makoto Kawabata, then Tibetan exorcist chant.
Hour 3: Blues-pop from Mali. South American guitar instruments, blues, gospel, Schubert played by Peter Serkin.
Hour 4: Satie played slowly by Philip Corner, Agnes Martin speaks, Robert Crouch, Sibelius
Starting out digging in the reggae library, the show takes a left turn at the new William Parker CD, spends some time with Hector Villalobos and Henry Brant, ending up with some international vocal music and long-form Robert Crouch.
Hour 1: Starts at 1:55 so you get a few minutes of Goodwrench. Then it’s a reggae vibe for forty minutes
Hour 2: Villalobos, Wet Hair, Kyoto Nohgaku Kai.
Hour 3: Villalobos, Henry Brant.
Hour 4: Jazz, international vocal, ambient.
Each mp3 is 70 minutes long and starts a few minutes before the hour, and ends a few minutes after.
Streams will be available until September 26.
In the 6th century, ancient music and dance came to Japan from the Kingdom of Kudara in what is now Korea. In the 8th century the Chinese circus came to Japan, with acrobatics, pantomime, and comedy. These influences, in combination with indigenous rituals related to the passing of the seasons or cultivation of rice, form the basis for Noh theater, which took on its present form in the 14th century.
Noh theater troupes are led by a Grand Master and all members are blood relatives or adopted. Sons reprise roles of their fathers. Small gestures are mimicked through generations, eventually commanding much of the audience’s focus. The audience is made up of the Shogun, feudal lords, sophisticates and wealthy commoners.
This record features members of the Kyoto Noh Theater, designated as an Important Intangible Cultural Property by the Japanese government in 1957. It may seem like not much is going on. A wooden flute plays an ancient pentatonic melody, taiko strike here and there, a woodblock plays a slow roll as characters enter and exit the scene, dancers move in exact synchronization. The main character wears a wooden face mask, an ornate robe, and speaks in Old Japanese. A ceremonial tone pervades throughout.
